⚧POLⒶRIS⚧, ancom criminal @polarisfm@www.librepunk.club

@rune @lanodan They're using Cloudflare's "reverse proxy" (MITM). They market this as a "full-site CDN" (which it technically is, it's just also a MITM attack that people pay for). If it was just them loading a few libraries from Cloudflare's CDN it would be bad but not quite as awful. It could be mitigated with something like Decentraleyes or LocalCDN.

For those wondering what happened to the DR DOS developers: They went on to found Caldera and created several early networking focused GNU/Linux distributions with commercial support. They also started the first anti-trust suit against Microsoft.

This of course meant they could also re-enable it at any time should they feel threatened again.

A writeup can be found here by the first person to truly figure out the sheer malice of Microsoft: https://web.archive.org/web/20200926233925/https://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/archive/aard/index.htm

They disabled it by the time Windows 3.1 went retail because the tech enthusiasts and journalists who preferred DR DOS for it's better feature set had reported Windows 3.1 installation failed on DR DOS. The damage was done, sales of DR DOS plummeted, and OEMs stopped bundling DR DOS with their systems. The AARD code was still present in the retail release though, it just didn't trigger, leading to some people to reverse engineer it and figure out what Microsoft had actually done.

#TIL: Microsoft felt threatened by Digital Research DOS (DR DOS) which had introduced superior features and was compatible with MS DOS. IBM had even begun bundling DR DOS with their PCs over MS DOS. As a result, Microsoft implemented the "AARD code" which would only trigger in the Windows 3.1 Christmas Beta when installation was attempted on non-MS DOS variants. It would simply instruct the user to contact MS DOS support. If you bypass the "AARD code", it works just as it would on MS DOS.

I can't believe I have to say this but: Don't use Cloudflare, and especially don't use Cloudflare on your Tor hidden service.

Company: "We have a very rigorous approval process for SDK access"
Me: Gets approved with a fake name, the address of a Portland McDonalds, and my employer listed as "AssEattr IoT LLC"

Retro computing enthusiasts out here preventing e-waste from being dumped into rivers or burned.

@Earthshine Some chip makers will boast about how their new CPUs are much more environmentally friendly because of their lower power consumption, ignoring all of the carbon emitted from the factories used to make them, develop new CPU mass production techniques every couple of years, etc. It's very deceptive.

Me having a slightly higher power draw in one CPU is outweighed by the astronomical amounts of carbon emitted by producing hundreds-of-thousands of low yield 10nm CPUs.

@Earthshine I used a Thinkpad X200 (2007) until this year, when it finally died. It had a Core 2 Duo. Once I upgraded it to 4GB of RAM it worked fine for most tasks (besides GPU intensive ones). It would have otherwise been government/corporate e-waste.

The idea you need a 64-core Ryzen with 128GB of RAM for anything but data science or **very** heavy server workloads is absurd. If you're running a small, personal website or Masto instance you can run it off of a laptop you find in a dumpster.

@cadence emuMMC is your friend if you want to boot modded BlissOS. When you're booting something that isn't modified BlissOS Nintendo has no idea of knowing at all, so you're safe if you want to boot GNU/Linux, Android, or whatever else people manage to port.

@xnx38h Oh yeah. Phone vendors get very upset if you try to do anything outside of what you're "supposed to do"

They need to get your data, after all.

@cadence Whenever I have to work with ARM CUDA (or Tegra specific features in general) I just boot my Switch into GNU/Linux and hook up a keyboard. It's a pretty beefy ARM machine all things considered, just very blobby on the Linux side.

The Atmosphere devs are working on reimplementing a libre version of BlissOS's kernel though, it already has a pretty decent level of compatibility with actual BlissOS.

Fun fact: All of the patents have expired on the SH-2 CPU, used in both the Sega 32X and Saturn. It has be re-implemented as Free Hardware in the J2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperH#J_Core